Month: December 2016

Not to get all high-and-mighty, but I believe that self reflection is one of the most important things an individual can do. Turning a critical eye on your accomplishments as well as your personal failings give you a sense of achievement and can help motivate you towards improvement. I wasn’t always a believer in this idea; however, my MBA courses — where I had to deal with my personal shortcomings often — led me to realize the power such reflections can provide. So with that in mind, here is a listing of the major things, both professionally and personally, I was able to complete in 2016 as well as some goals that I fell short on (but hopefully can remedy in 2017).

I’ve been using the Boise Foothills 50k Frenzy training schedule (speaking of a race I want to run…!) as a “loose guide” — I’ve never been one to follow strictly to a running regiment, but it does give you a little insight that you are (or aren’t!) at a point where you should be.

Been consistently running 5 – 6 days a week; averaging 25 – 30 miles per week. So according to the schedule, I’m a little ahead of what is required for a 50k trail run, so I’m feeling pretty good.

Longest run has been a 13.0 miles where I did it in 1:45 (it was under optimal conditions).

Lately, conditions in Salt Lake City have been snowy/rainy, so my trail times have slipped from ~8:30 min/mile to ~10 min/mile. I think I’m going to upgrade my YakTraxs to Microspikes to provide better grip on snow as this seems to be a reoccurring problem with my running.

Here’s a screengrab (since Nike makes it impossible to share your Activity Page) of my latest trail run on the Bonneville Shoreline Trail:

The question pool that my auto-generated Number Sense test relies on has swelled to 1200 questions and is growing at a rate of about 500 questions per week. There might be some weird artifacts — like two Roman Numeral questions or three integral questions within the same exam — but these are attributable to fact that you are randomly selecting problems from the pool and is not indicative of some problem with the program. As a whole, I’d say I am about 90-95% accurate in replicating a competition exam.

Currently, the difficultly in the auto-generated tests are comparable to UIL Invitational through District exams. I plan on, separately, creating harder practice tests that replicate Regional and State competitions for those who want more advanced practice. (I didn’t want to discourage novice competitors by incorporating very challenging problems into the question pool that could be randomly incorporated into the practice tests).

As this project moves into the “auto-pilot” phase, I’ve been thinking about what I want to do next. One topic I am very passionate about is personal finance and the journey towards Financial Independence (or more commonly know as FI). One thing that has been helpful to both myself and my friends is a more “real-world” mortgage amortization table that I created which aids a future-homeowner with their decision of finding the right house to buy and the type of loan to buy it with. I’m beginning work on developing python code to generate this table from basic loan/house information as well as output helpful statistics (e.g. the amount of time where a 15-year loan is preferred to a 30-year, assuming a particular market return, etc…).